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The volume of email cloaked in encryption technology is rapidly rising as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major Internet companies try to shield their users’ online communications from government spies and other snoops.

Silicon Valley is escalating pressure on President Barack Obama to curb the U.S. government surveillance programs that vacuum personal information off the Internet and threaten the technology industry’s financial livelihood.

The Obama administration’s top national security lawyers on Monday rejected the idea that the government should stop collecting copies of every American’s telephone records every day, telling an independent oversight board that it would lose valuable time if each time it launched a terror investigation it had to seek the private billing records from individual phone companies.

A federal court should not permit five leading Internet companies to reveal how often they are ordered to turn over information about their customers in national security investigations, the government argued in papers released Wednesday.

Google is asking the Obama administration for permission to disclose more details about the U.S. government’s demands for email and other personal information transmitted online in an effort to distance itself from an Internet dragnet.